Benjamin
Friedlander: I began
writing seriously in high school, but there was no single
moment of decision, only crystallizations of earlier
desires. Hearing Robert Hayden read at the Guggenheim
Museum was one such moment; encountering the work of
Delmore Schwartz another. "The heavy bear who goes
with me"  that line summed up perfectly the
way I felt about my own body. Not that I knew so at the
time. I accepted the poem as a philosophical truism,
which is probably what Schwartz himself intended.
Nowadays, I read it as a clownish "Song of
Myself": a statement of Jewish-American identity
struggling to climb above the bar of its hyphen. No
surprise that it struck a chord: I too was a fat boy
struggling to do a few chin-ups in gym class.

I grew up in a household
where books were especially important  my father's
an historian  but there was precious little
literature. I remember some old college texts on a shelf
near the ceiling; they went with my mother after my
parents got divorced. And there was para-lit galore
 mostly science fiction. But those books weren't
where the power lay. The history books were what held my
fascination. Not that I ever absorbed more than a few
pages out of ten thousand. But there were times ... for
instance, my father owned a set of bound transcripts from
the Nuremberg trials  one of the few extant sets in
private hands, I suspect  and my brother and I used
to pore over the photographs of evidence: soap made from
human fat; lampshades made from human skin. The text, of
course, was far more forbidding. Not that this kept me
from trying. I used to open volumes at random, looking
for illustrations or reading a stray line or paragraph. I
went through the whole library that way. This, I think,
more than anything, made me susceptible to the charms of
difficult poetry.

All in all, art was in
short supply. My father owned one or two Brecht-Weil
operas (he used to sing from Mahogany when happy)
and my mother owned Abbey Road, along with several
Neil Diamond records. We did somewhat better with visual
art. I remember a framed Rembrandt poster of a rabbi, and
another framed poster of a Klee. One summer we bought a
few pastiches of Picasso's illustrations for Don
Quixote. I realize now that my mother had a strong
feeling for art, but this was thoroughly repressed all
through childhood. My father too; he has such definite
tastes now in clothes, in food, in photography, in
architecture, but this was completely hidden when I was
growing up.

I note all this only to
say that my sensibility developed under the peculiar
pressures of an intellectual household where aesthetic
issues were pushed to the margins. Which no doubt
explains why I gravitate toward historicist modes of
reading and resist formalism. Or why I'm drawn to poets
like Dickinson and Celan, who define craft in existential
terms. My appreciation for beauty came shockingly late.

In a strange way, I think
of poetry, the poetry I most admire, as occupying a
threshold position between art and non-art. That twilight
space feels very comfortable to me, for reasons that I
don't entirely understand, but which are probably
implicated in my autobiography. Poetry appeals to me,
first and foremost, because it is neither fiction nor
nonfiction, but bears an aberrant relationship to both.

NG: Speaking of "the heavy bear
who goes with me," I'd like to address what I see in
your work as a kind of detached-but-profound
subjectivity. I'm thinking particularly of one of my
favorite of your books, A Winter's Notebook, and
lines like these:

Me
misplaced

in a
doorway.

* * *

The clock

divides
me into strophes
& I sing.

* * *

I look

&
listen to the detached
heat of my looking

eyes.

And the memorable,

Hidden
in my pants my penis:

the
smudge of flesh
that in an instant

changes
pulse. Why
must the body share

its
weight with mind?

I remember also your
telling me once (and I quoted you in my Mayer thesis)
that you write to "leave a trace of your
subjectivity." I'm with you on that one, but it's
not exactly a fashionable stance these days. Do you still
feel this way? In what ways do you apprehend / encounter
/ delineate (add your favorite verbs here) self in
writing?

BF: One downside to leaving "a
trace of your subjectivity": some traces are like
high-school yearbook pictures. Very embarrassing to look
at later.

A Winter's Notebook
was written, god, in 1981-82, when I was 21 years old,
half my life ago. The poems there are youthful in a way I
couldn't possibly recreate today. Written while I was
momentarily a dropout from Berkeley, working in a copy
shop, reading H.D.'s Trilogy, Robert Kelly's Songs
I-XXX, Ronald Johnson's Book of the Green Man,
Laura Riding's Selected Poems in Five Sets 
a widening circle of readings that originated in Robert
Duncan's notebook excerpts in the back of The New
American Poetry and that eventually led me to embrace
the Language Poets. A classic case of misrecognition: the
mentions of Stein, Zukofsky and Riding in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
gave me the false and oh so naive impression that the LPs
and I were "on the same page." But I'm
rambling.

Yeah, I still believe that
writing is the record of particular lives. But I also
believe now that the "recording" occurs most
uniquely, or most revealingly, in registers of meaning
that supercede intention. Though I've experimented with
autobiography these last few years, I'm more concerned
with a writing "from" than "about"
myself. I remember Johanna Drucker once saying that
feminism means taking yourself as typical rather than
exceptional  an idea that left a lot of echoes in
my head. And then, I've always understood the root
insight of "Projective Verse" to be that
"language as such" is a meaningless
abstraction: that any instance of language has an origin
(or better, series of origins: physical, experiential,
historical) no less important for understanding what the
words are saying than the "text itself."

The lines you quote from A
Winter's Notebook  they sound so much better in
excerpt, so thanks! you make them legible again  do
have analogues in my recent writing. For instance,
there's a poem in Partial Objects which reads, in
its original version:

AFTER
SYLVIA PLATH

Peeled
to my bra
And panties I
Had a hard-on though
I was scared

To say
no
Means no
Matter how
Well dressed you are

Someone
will always be
Willing to dress you down 
Playing doctor
To see how your wound has healed.

This isn't literal
autobiography (transvestism isn't one of my secret
pleasures or fantasies), but it does capture for me an
abjection I've felt in sex, at certain moments  an
experience that doesn't at all cancel out the possibility
of excitement.

Or here's another example,
from A Knot Is Not a Tangle:

MOTHER

It
hurts
to chew
the nipple of your pain
and feel the milk-
lessness of time
from the wrong end
of a nursing grudge
cowed by a pendulous Why?

This one is more obviously
figurative, not to mention more obviously extravagant. My
relationship with my mother is far from incestuous; my
experience of her pain is, if anything, too distant, not
too close. But there's something at once infantilizing
and unsatisfying in the way her pain mediates what
relationship we do have, so the breast-feeding image
works for me.

You say that these
preoccupations are "not exactly fashionable."
Maybe so, at least in certain circles. I was amused when Poetics
Journal led off its Elsewhere issue with a
short statement by Felix Guattari that defined the
"poetic function" as a "catalyzing"
of "existential agencies." Yes, exactly,
I thought, but I can't believe that Hejinian and
Watten think so too! I suppose we were all hearing
what we wanted in that piece.

My acknowledgement of
Sylvia Plath was retrospective. It occurred to me that I
was taking cues from her long after the poem was actually
written. This has something to do with fashion, though
I'm not exactly sure how.

Confessional Poetry 
by which I mean the work associated with Lowell's Life
Studies  has never been very satisfying to me
and has not held up very well over time, but I do find
confession, as a formal strategy, a useful
starting point for interesting work. Freed from the
demands of literal autobiography, the combination of
shock and self-exposure can ground a writing that might
otherwise seem merely frivolous. This is something I
learned from reading Carla Harryman, though I see it also
in Kathy Acker, Dodie Bellamy, Samuel Delany ... Philip
Roth. I'm trying to think of a poet who does the same
thing, and can't. Perhaps prose writers are better
equipped to absorb confessionalism as a formal principle.
In any case, the real taboo in experimental circles isn't
subjectivity, but self-expression  a fine line that
different writers draw across different thresholds of
authenticity.

NG: You've participated in a lot of
collaborations  a mode I'm partial to. I recently
re-read a postcard exchange you had with Jean Day that
was published in ... was it Ottottole? The writing
was so vivid. There's Myth, a collaboration with
Jeff Gburek. I also have here Oriflamme Day, a
collaboration with Stephen Rodefer and comic books, in
which you use the typewriter almost like a paintbrush;
the lines make spirals and rough curves all over the
pages, each of which has a decontextualized DC comic
image. Other lines work as captions. How did you assemble
this book? And what about Nagrivator, which you
wrote with Pat Reed? Delicate poems, domestic references,
an elegy to Xena the cat  this book seems to have
been born right out of daily life. How was Hui Neng
 a collaboration with Pat Reed and Andrew Schelling
based on the Diamond Sutra  written? Do you still
write collaborations? What are your thoughts on
collaborative writing?

BF: I love collaboration and would
love to do more. My editing projects have all been shared
labors too. For instance, my edition of Larry Eigner's
criticism was worked out practically line by line in
Larry's living room. And I've edited magazines with
Andrew Schelling, Paul Batlan, Bill Howe, Chris
Funkhouser, Belle Gironda, Graham Foust ... Steve Evans
and I are just now assuming the editorial duties for Sagetrieb,
so the trend continues.

Collaboration is the
exploration of a friendship, and each one differs wildly
from the others. Stephen and I made Oriflamme Day
when we first got to know one another. We made the book
for a reading. The collages were mine; the torn-up text,
Stephen's. We wrote the captions side by side in my
kitchen, over a bottle of Stoli. A lot of the language
came out of Sexual Heretics, an anthology of gay
male writing from nineteenth-century Britain. Come to
think of it, we also wrote an homage to you that day,
Stephen having taken the line "Go for Gordon's"
from a liquor ad.

Hui Neng was also
made for a reading. Inspired by Jackson Mac Low, I
randomized the Diamond Sutra  which inspired Andrew
to write the essay. Pat then added the illustrations.

Nagrivator was
mostly composed on vacation. Those are probably the sweetest
poems I've ever had a hand in. There was going to be a
sequel, Boot-Type Shoe, but Pat and I split up
before we could write more than a poem or two.

The postcards with Jean
were a long, ongoing project that only ended because our
friendship ended. I'm still not sure why that happened.
We were practically in love with one another, then, poof!
all the sympathy between us bled away. In any case, there
are probably a hundred cards all together. Jean's are
simply amazing  the best writing she ever did.

Myth and its
sequel, Prophecy, were also installments in an
ongoing project. We got about halfway through Negative
Theology , then Jeff left for Italy and I for
Buffalo. I hold out hope that we'll pick up where we left
off someday. We also planned volumes called Shit
and Lyrical Ballads.

What else? Carla
Billitteri and I have translated from Italian together,
just a few poems. Nick Lawrence and I wrote a goofy book
on Michael Palmer  it isn't quite finished. Rod
Smith and I have tried a few things. That's about it in
recent years. I guess the circumstances haven't been
entirely propitious. But circumstances change, or I hope
they do.

NG: Circumstances were certainly
propitious for Jimmy & Lucy's House of
"K", which was by far the best grassroots
poetics forum of its time. The contributors included Bob
Perelman, Charles Bernstein, Robert Grenier, Rachel Blau
du Plessis, Larry Price, David Bromige, Larry Eigner, Jed
Rasula, Alan Davies, Jean Day, Steve Benson, Stephen
Rodefer, Tina Darragh, Bruce Boone ... I could go on
 and most of the writing is incisive and inventive.
How did you and Andrew Schelling decide to start Jimmy
and Lucy's? What was your experience of editing it?
Why did you stop putting it out? What are some of the
most memorable pieces you published? I heard a rumor
(from you?) that the old issues were going to be archived
on line  is that true?

BF: No, not true  unless Andrew
has been sniffing out that possibility.(*) But I don't see how: the nine
issues probably amount to over a thousand pages; getting
permission from all the contributors would be an enormous
headache. And then there's the scanning and proofreading
of text. Jimmy & Lucy's was emphatically
precomputer. We typed every issue on an old warhorse IBM
that used proportional spacing. The typeface looked great
but made for incredible hassles when we had to make
corrections  a razor blade and rubber cement
affair. Not that I regret the labor. I learned so much
from the physicality of that experience: not just about
writing and editing, but also about the hidden cost of
poorly thought-out writing. I can't tell you how often
Andrew and I would shake our heads and say to one
another, usually after struggling for an hour over a knot
of illogical prose: "We care more about this
than the author!" There's a generosity involved in
any act of attention; writers who write with care give
care as well. This is something I learned pounding
typewriter keys after midnight.

You call the magazine
"the best grassroots poetics forum of its
time." I thank you for the compliment, but the sad
fact is there wasn't much competition. We began in 1984,
a few years after the demise of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E,
shortly after Poetics Journal began. Sulfur
and Temblor also published criticism, but they
served somewhat adjacent communities. There were also
occasional forums that came out of New College, but that
too was fed by a different community. Later on in the
'80s the boundaries blurred considerably, but when we
began the authors you mention were by and large without
other forum. Except, of course, for PJ  but PJ,
unlike Jimmy & Lucy's, had an agenda that made
it less immediately responsive to the momentary ripples
of interest that can be so definitive of a scene.

PJ, edited by Lyn
Hejinian and Barrett Watten, was a West Coast answer to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
magazine, and it had the stated aim of extending L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E's
critical discourse beyond short, impressionistic takes
into a more rigorous, more academic style of
argumentation. I was 25 at the time and had a hard time
understanding why L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was
impressionistic, but I certainly understood that there
was a real difference at issue. As it happens, I liked
both magazines, but for just this reason I sensed that
there was space for a poetics journal (lower case
"p" and "j") that emphasized short
pieces and reviews rather than longer essays on general
themes; that served a local community of poets and didn't
worry about dialogue with academics or even artists
working in other genres and media  though this
already defined what we were doing as somewhat different
from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. And I want to stress that
our stance was not anti-academic; we were simply
cognizant that our magazine could fill a different need
than PJ.

Typing this out, I realize
that the entire problem is dated now, or in any case
restricted to print culture. Andrew and I xeroxed Jimmy
& Lucy's fifty copies at a time. Establishing a
readership was a concrete issue (and one we didn't handle
very well: we had a horrible habit, for instance, of not
cashing checks  to the point where we screwed up
Bob Perleman's checkbook just horribly). The
internet has changed all that, and not just because
limited print runs are no longer an obstacle to
distribution. Readership too is no longer an obstacle, or
not in the same way. A better way to say this would be:
that readerships on the web are not nearly as easily
specified (or even understood) as they are with a print
journal.

What I liked most about
the magazine was soliciting work and seeing it all the
way through to print. There's nothing more pleasurable as
an editor than being responsible for a fine piece of
writing that wouldn't have existed if you hadn't asked
for it. To be sure, there were many writers we couldn't
get  they didn't write criticism, or were already
able to place their work in bigger venues  but I
was gratified by the number who were willing to
write something specifically for a journal with such tiny
distribution. And yes, there is quite a bit of
interesting work that first appeared there, some of it
never reprinted: Barrett Watten's "XYZ of
Reading," the Carla Harryman feature in no. 2
(essays by you, Steve Benson, Tom Mandel, David
Sheidlower, Laura Moriarty), Robert Duncan's "The
Homosexual in Society" (the original essay with
later addenda), Eileen Corder and Nick Robinson's
"Skeletons in the Dressing Room: El Teatro
Campesino," Andrew Schelling's interview with Lyn
Hejinian, Hannah Wiener's "Mostly about the
Sentence," a half dozen pieces by Larry Eigner, the
transcript of a conference on poetry and meditation held
at Green Gulch Zen Center. And that's just a fraction of
the whole.

I'm proud of some of the
stances we took. Our decision to celebrate Tuumba Press
as a whole, rather than an individual author, still seems
to me the only attempt to deal with Language Writing as a
collective enterprise in detail, by which I mean that it
wasn't a series of general statements about
"Language Writing" as such, but a series of
short essays (and three interviews) on some 37 particular
books, not all of them by the so-called "major
figures"  and not all of them Language Poets.

Without doubt, the most
significant piece we published was an obituary of
Foucault written by my friend Phil Horvitz, who had the
serendipitous opportunity of a coffee with the
philosopher when Foucault was teaching at U.C. Berkeley.
The piece was a memoir; we published it alongside a
straightforward summation of Foucault's achievements by
Johanna Drucker. When the magazine came out, Barry Watten
came up to me and profusely praised Johanna's piece, then
chided me for including Phil's, which he described as the
worst sort of personalizing gossip. I was suitably
abashed. Years later, however, it came to light that
Phil's memoir preserved Foucault's only recorded comments
on AIDS! The piece has since been cited in a number of
biographies.

Andrew and I disbanded the
magazine for a number of reasons. Partly we stopped
because it seemed ridiculous to be publishing book
reviews by young writers who had no outlet for their
poetry (Pat Reed, Jessica Grim, Steve Farmer, Michael
Anderson, Andrea Hollowell, yourself), but we were also
growing tired of the Language Poets, whose work we'd been
serving more or less diligently for half a decade, and
who were starting to treat us with unremitting mistrust.
Anyway, it was a good time to stop. Andrew and I learned
so much doing Jimmy & Lucy's, and it was time
to put what we'd learned to use in another context, to
see if our knowledge had any independent validity. We had
a false start with Chumolungma Globe (much of the
work we'd gathered for our second issue we handed over to
Jessica Grim, who used it in Big Alice), and then
another good run with Dark Ages Clasp the Daisy Root.
By the time that one came to its natural conclusion,
Andrew and I had both split the Bay Area.

(*) Since writing
this sentence I've received a letter from Craig Dworkin
proposing just what you say: an internet archive. Shows
what I know!

NG: Now you edit, with Graham Foust, Lagniappe.
Can you describe its editorial philosophy? One thing that
surprises me about it is that you sometimes include
negative reviews. What's the thinking behind that? In
your mind, what are the main differences from Jimmy
& Lucy's House of "K"? Are they related
to two very different zeitgeists?

BF: Yeah, different eras in the life
of the art, but also: different periods in my own life.
In the '80s I was an unabashed enthusiast. I was, I then
felt, a young poet in an era in which the older poets
were doing important work (however unsatisfying at
times). And I took strength from the fact 
sometimes rather smugly  that my friends and I
(Andrew, Pat, David Sheidlower) were practically the only
people in the world paying continuous attention. We
weren't Language Poets, or students of the Language
Poets, or Language bashers, but we hung in there, going
to just about every event and buying all the books. And
the older poets didn't know what to make of us.

The scene today is much
more chaotic  and isn't even "the scene,"
not in the same sense. There are now many scenes,
adjacent and overlapping, all aware of one another, at
least to some extent. Of course, this was also true in
the Bay Area in the '80s, where the Language Poets, New
College poets, "New Narrative" writers, Bolinas
and North Beach scenes, etc., were all engaged in making
their work known at the same time, in the same space, but
each one of those scenes had a certain hermeticism to it.
The confluence today is much larger and much less easily
defined. And it's much less fixed by geography  not
just because of the internet, but because there's so much
moving around. An enthusiast today has a much more
difficult task than I had back then, especially if the
enthusiasm is going to be intelligent, purposeful,
differentiating. Readme is delightful proof that
an editorial policy founded on enthusiasm is still
possible without sacrifice of usefulness.

It's not that I've lost my
own enthusiasm, though it's true I feel it less and less
in the context of contemporary poetry (this summer I'm
immersing myself in the eighteenth century); but I've
found that my talents and interests are best served, at
present, by reading deeply and critically rather than
widely. The enthusiast maps out, as completely as
possible, what is possible. Right now, I prefer to
figure out what it means to live on one particular piece
of that map (as in my work on Olson, Dickinson, O'Hara).
In this sense, I now understand, as I didn't then, why
Lyn and Barry thought of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as
impressionistic. Though I still value that sort of
activity, when it's done well.

But that doesn't quite
explain Lagniappe, which is not exactly a forum
for deep reading  and isn't just a magazine. Lagniappe
is also a conceptual art project. Every issue, after the
first one anyhow, also includes a review, if not several,
by one of Graham's alter egos or my own. (My favorite is
Wyman Jennings, who's really Clement Greenberg.)
Tomfoolery, I suppose, but it helps to keep us interested
and enlivens the writing. And speaks to the fact, I
suppose, that we're as interested in exercising our
faculties at large as we are in the work under
discussion.

Is that really true? It's
true of some of the work. I'm really very poor at
generalizing. And I wouldn't want to pretend that my
intentions  or Graham's  are clearly defined,
or without contradictory impulse. Or that we're in
agreement with one another.

What we wanted, above all,
was a journal that would give space to brief, critical
assessments of current writing. When we started, there
didn't seemed to be much book reviewing  that has
changed quite a bit in the interim  and the little
we saw was in effect published press release: effusive,
meaningless praise. Our reaction to that tendency is
often read as negativity. I think of it instead as
creating a context in which praise might again become
meaningful. But I know others see it differently. Graham,
by the way, does most of the production work, especially
now that I've moved to Maine.

NG: You once made the following
statement on Jordan Davis's subsubpoetics e-list:

Since
my own interests as a reader tend toward struggle
(Dickinson, Mandelstam, Moore, Celan; the Olson who
wrote at the end of the Maximus Poems, "I've
sacrificed everything for an act of attention")
I tend myself to be suspicious of play, but this
doesn't mean I think John Cage was an idle playboy!

Why do you think you are
leery of the ludic? And do you think you are
categorically so? Are there any "playful"
writers whose work you like and/or respect? Certain of
your more recent writings  especially Partial
Objects and Period Piece  seem to me
to be full of a bitter, not unplayful, humor. I'd say the
same of certain satires you are thought to have written
pseudonymously. Do you think humor and playfulness are
equatable? And can you tell me about the personal,
ethical, and aesthetic values that underlie your taste's
tendency toward "struggle"?

BF: My aversion to "play"
(which evolved slowly and is now starting to wane,
actually) derives from two different sources. The more
serious is Emmanuel Levinas, who defines ethics and
aesthetics as mutually exclusive precisely on account of
play's centrality to the latter. He articulates this
position most provocatively in an early essay,
"Reality and Its Shadow." "Art," he
says there, "essentially disengaged, constitutes, in
a world of initiative and responsibility, a dimension of
evasion." I first read that statement twelve years
ago, at a moment of deep dissatisfaction with so-called
"experimental" writing, and it left a deep
impression.

Readers of Levinas usually
take the anti-art argument as a challenge and try to
devise an "ethical poetics" rigorous to his
standards. I've tried to resist that impulse. Yes, the
poem addresses its reader (the "other") and is
a mode of "welcome" (a key word for Levinas),
but this ethical dimension of poetic language is equally
available to other forms of expression. For instance,
telemarketing, or heckling a performer. Poetry's particular
virtues don't further this aspect of language. And you
can see why furthering would be necessary given my
examples. That, perhaps, is the source of the bitter
humor you note in my later work. I don't celebrate play.
Rather, I celebrate the exposure of play as a kind of
violence perpetrated against the reader.

But I've also grown averse
to "play" for more trivial reasons. Simply put,
I've read too much shitty writing that takes
"aleatory" or "novelty" or
"experiment" as its alibi to have much faith in
poems flagrantly averse to close reading. And faith is
definitely required. Why else stick with a poem when its
value is not so readily apparent? You have to believe
that the author had a justifiable reason for requiring so
much work (and yes, work is definitely required when it
comes to reading playful writing). Then too, I'm leery of
the piety with which many of my peers conceive of their
play  probably it's the piety that bugs me more
than the play.

But let me put this in
another, friendlier way: writing that resists reading
teaches many things, and Ive learned those
things (or some of them). What I hunger for now, as
reader and writer alike, leads me to explore other
directions.

NG: I love that you said you're bugged
by piety. I couldn't agree with you more. So I hope
you'll indulge me while I get contentious for a minute
with a couple of your very thought-provoking remarks. I'm
afraid I have to disagree with Levinas' claim. He sounds
awfully dour  and like a non-artist. I don't think
art is "essentially disengaged." First, it's
inextricable from the person place and time that exudes
it, and second, when the artist is absorbed in her
process she is deeply engaged, and exercising
volition. The political ramifications? Whether working
from a Cagean aesthetic or writing a poem protesting
police brutality the art represents an instance of
unalienated labor and hence of rebellion. Didn't Adorno
(to whom I suspect you're not wildly sympathetic) say
much the same thing? It's not the same as joining an NGO
to help the minefield victims in Cambodia, but it's not
evasion either  rather it is very certainly an act
of initiative and will. Please feel free to pop a hole in
this argument  it could just be an elaborate (or
overly simplistic?) justification for an activity I
enjoy. Do you think I'm being pious?

Also, another question ...
if play is a kind of violence (violence seeming to mean
"that which forces one to work") perpetrated
against the reader, then isn't difficulty also violent
(and therefore Dickinson, Celan, et al)? And isn't
the-value-of-what-one-experiences-or-learns-from-reading-a
particular-poem relative? Let me get a little less
abstract and bring this around to your own work. I've
heard you say you revere Duncan and feel yourself to be
poetically akin to him; some of your work seems to use
arcana, philosophy, history and myth in a Duncanesque
way. The book I have in mind here is Myth, your
collaboration with Jeff Gburek. It's fascinating, replete
with diagrams, a bibliography, a kind of multi-form
essay-poem ... but not, to your average Joe or maybe even
your average poet, 100% "reader-friendly." How
is this book, in your terms, not violent towards a reader
in the way an orgy of signifiers might be?

BF: You raise an important question
when you ask if difficulty and play are equally violent
 though the opposition is not quite exact since
playful writing can be just as difficult as the other
kind.

I've been reading American
Fictions, a collection of essays by Elizabeth
Hardwick, and there's one on Stein that ends by comparing
The Making of Americans with Ulysses.
Hardwick speaks of both writers as difficult, but to my
mind the difference she articulates is in effect the
difference between a poetics of play and whatever the
other kind might be. Not that Joyce lacks for play, but
the end result is certainly unlike anything encountered
in Stein.

For Hardwick, the
difference turns on each's requirements for an adequate
reading. Joyce, she says,

is
difficult because he has more knowledge, more
language, more rhythmical musicality than the reader
can easily summon. With Gertrude Stein we are
frequently urged to forgetfulness, to erasure of
tonal memory, so that we may hear the hypnotic
murmurings of what is a literature in basic English.

This reminds me of a
conversation I once had with Jena Osman, when Jena was
struggling to write a seminar paper on Finnegans Wake.
She surprised herself by hating that book; Jena felt that
Joyce's relationship to history  more specifically:
his requirement that the reader be mindful of
history  was totalitarian. She pointed to Stein as
the polar opposite, not only in terms of what a reading
of Stein requires, but in the political implications of
that requirement. She saw Stein's erasure of history as a
liberatory gesture, which it certainly is  up to a
point.

Sartre says (I think Jena
would agree), "Writing is a certain way of wanting
freedom; once you have begun, you are committed,
willy-nilly." The statement is no less true of Joyce
than Stein, but in Stein the desire for freedom has gone
a step further, to become, in effect, a form of
self-actualization: an unbridled manifestation of
aesthetic will. Responsibility for the other? That just
isn't part of the equation.

"Reality and Its
Shadow" was first published in Les Temps Modernes,
the house organ for Sartrean existentialism. When Levinas
defined art as "essentially disengaged," he was
being deliberately provocative. He was telling Sartre
that commitment to freedom is, from the standpoint of
ethics, an evasion of commitment, at least insofar as the
other falls out of the picture.

No question, Levinas is
dour. Jill Robbins, my teacher at Buffalo, used to love
saying, "This is NOT a feel-good ethics!" At
the same time, his rejection of art is fraught with
contradictions. For instance, the first and last lines of
Totality and Infinity are silent evocations of
Rimbaud and Baudelaire; and Levinas himself was a writer.
Then too, over the course of a long career he altered his
thoughts on art in a number of small but important ways.
"Reality and Its Shadow" is but one of many
statements on art, and the earliest to boot.

What is violence for
Levinas? Among other things, "reduction of the other
to the logic of the same." This means, in ordinary
language, treating the individual as an abstraction, as
the representation of a category (for instance, as
"the reader"). The precision of the analysis is
such that even the word "individual" is
problematic  the individual being but one
in a series. The other qua other is singular,
"unique in its genus." Given this sensitivity
to the possibilities for violence in language as well as
in action, it's no wonder that Levinas took a dim view of
art, at least initially.

Is Dickinson violent?
Certainly she wrote with a heightened awareness of the
stakes of her address. It's noteworthy, for instance,
that she withheld the vast majority of her poems from
publication  though she gave them freely to her
friends. It's also noteworthy that so many of her poems
are devoid of content. The giving of the poem is
its content:

I've
none to tell me to but Thee 
So when Thou failest, nobody 
It was a little tie 
It just held Two, nor those it held
Since Somewhere thy sweet Face has spilled
Beyond my Boundary 

If
things were opposite  and Me
And Me it were  that ebbed from Thee
On some unanswering Shore 
Would'st thou seek so  just say
That I the Answer may pursue
Unto the lips it eddied through 
So  overtaking Thee 

She makes an heroic
attempt to stay the solidification of a living language
into aesthetic object  to be ethical in a sense
that Levinas would recognize. If she fails, it's because we
arrive on the scene, transforming her work into aesthetic
object (or what is worse: "intellectual
property").

At the same time, she was
no less aware of her posterity than Whitman. Except that
Dickinson doesn't pretend to be able to embrace her
future. Quite the contrary, she draws our attention to
her distance, for instance by making an analogy between
book and grave, poem and gravestone. Far from pretending
to engage us in an actual relationship, Dickinson makes
explicit the nature of the gulf we readers would have to
overcome in order to revivify her language and make it
again an instrument of ethics:

Herein
a Blossom lies 
A Sepulchre, between 
Cross it, and overcome the Bee 
Remain  'tis but a Rind.

Again and again in
Dickinson, the gift of language turns out to be a
language for witholding gifts. Yet she enjoins us to
read. Is there violence in that request? Oh yeah. And the
level of awareness with which the violence is marshaled
makes it all the more terrifying.

In my own work I've passed
through many phases, including a Duncan phase, a Stein
phase. But most recently I've been taking my cues from
Dickinson, exploring the structures of address, trying to
bring the violence latent in all language to the surface
of my attention, making it an issue in the reader's
reception a la Bruce Andrews. I wouldn't want to write
this way forever, but I've learned a lot in the interim.

NG: At the risk of sounding like a job
interviewer, I'd like to ask you about your scholarly
pursuits over the years. Here's what I know: you have
devoted much attention to Larry Eigner, editing his prose
collection, Areas Lights Heights; you have
translated Celan; you have taught the Vietnam War. Tell
me about these and other areas that have captured your
scholarly fascination.

BF: I have to admit Im
uncomfortable calling myself a scholar. Last year I read
Gerald Graffs eye-opening account of how the
teaching of literature evolved into its current form as
an academic discipline. I hadnt appreciated until
then how sharply divided English departments used to be
by the scholarship-criticism distinction. I dont
know why I was surprised. I studied Art History at
Berkeley and one of my best teachers was a graduate
student later dismissed from the program because she
wasnt considered a serious scholar. Why? Because
she wrote art criticism! In this sense, I think of myself
as a critic, not a scholar. Scholars do archival
research, trace sources, prepare new editions of texts,
compose annotations and write biographies or literary
histories. Critics speculate, theorize, give their
opinion, pass judgment, offer readings  just like
poets! Critics, unlike scholars, are willing and active
participants in the culture they study. Or so runs the
traditional distinction. But putting it baldly like that,
I see that the two roles are hopelessly intertwined (or
should I say hopefully?), at least for me. My work in the
Olson and Dickinson archives only enlarged the scope of
my critical readings  and hardly did away with the
need for speculation and theory. My new editions of
Eigner and Olson were hardly free of judgment and
opinion.

But then, this is
an era of activist scholarship. I think of Jerome
McGanns work on Byron, which proceeded on two
fronts: a distinguished edition of Byrons Poetical
Works and a series of critical interventions. The
same goes for Martha Nell Smith, whose eloquent
championing of the Emily Dickinson-Susan Gilbert
Dickinson relationship now takes the form of literary
criticism (Rowing in Eden), now of scholarship (Open
Me Carefully, an edition of the correspondence). Nina
Baym is an activist-scholar in a more straightforward
sense. Her American Women Writers and the Work of
History recovers an entire library of writings
composed between the Revolution and Civil War. Cultural
Studies has had an influence too. In the era of high
theory, criticism and scholarship still seemed to follow
separate paths. This doesnt seem true any more. The
book Im reading now, Criminal Conversations:
Sentimentality and Nineteenth-Century Legal Stories of
Adultery by Laura Hanft Korobkin, is typical of the
current blending: theoretically sophisticated readings of
extra-literary works collected through historical
research. The most enlightening book on American poetry
that I read in the last year is another good example:
The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of
Fitz-Greene Halleck by John W. M. Hallock.

I recognize some semblance
of my own intellectual project when I look at the work of
these various scholars, but my initial efforts as a scholar
were worked out in complete isolation from the
university. My edition of Larry Eigners critical
prose was a late 80s adventure, begun after I
dropped out of the MA program at Berkeley. It never
occurred to me to pursue this work academically 
nor did I ever think of getting advice from academics on
how to proceed. I used the Berkeley library, of course,
and I copied what I could from other scholarly editions,
but that was the end of it. Only when I was done did
David Lloyd propose that I receive my MA in compensation.
Even then the administration balked; I still had to write
a thesis. And though the thesis itself was judged, no one
showed the slightest interest in judging my work on the
manuscripts. Meanwhile: the Mark Twain editing project
was continuing apace, substantially supported with
university and other funds. I had a work study job at the
time in the library, one flight down from the Mark Twain
office, so I always knew where I stood  and where
Eigner stood  in relation to the so-called
"canon."

My discomfort with the
label scholar is probably a matter of self-image
too. There was a group of kids when I was growing up who
used to call me professor, I guess because I wore
glasses and liked to read books. It still shocks me that
I really am a professor. And then too, when I
compare what I do as a literary critic with what my
father does as an historian, it doesnt seem right
that both activities should be called by the same name.
The Eigner book is a case in point  I pity the
future scholar who tries to disentangle what Larry and I
concocted there. Dont get me wrong. I feel very
good about the end result. But working with Larry posed
problems that often overwhelmed my judgment, and that
left their mark on the book in a manner that defies all
notions of scholarly objectivity. Larry, as you know, had
cerebral palsy. His voice and handwriting were often
difficult to understand, and although he typed whenever
possible, even his typing required line-by-line
interpretation. Complicating matters was the fact that
the book was compiled from a disparate array of notes,
letters, essays and reviews, some of them 35 years old,
and many of them existing in obviously corrupt printed
versions only. Larry was bemused by this material, to say
the least, and gamely went about the task of preparing a
text for publication. Just here, however, where a real
scholar would have stepped back, I imposed myself. Of
course, I didnt think of it in those terms at the
time. I considered myself a facilitator, and took
pleasure in the fact that the book wouldnt have
existed  that much of what the book contained
wouldn't have existed had I not intervened in its
production. For instance, I placed no limit on
Larrys tinkering with the text. Indeed, I egged him
on, inviting additions as well as corrections. (Many of
these additions were dictated, which means that they
exist in my handwriting only.) Worse still, I
allowed my own likes and dislikes to shape the general
course of Larrys approach to the material. This was
probably unavoidable. My visits to Larry formed a major
part of his social life at the time and he was eager to
please. But whatever reticence or objectivity I had at
the start of the project quickly disappeared in the chaos
of the experience itself. An experience I treasure as one
of the most important in my life.

I'm not sure that that
answers your question.

NG: Well, believe it or not, you are
indeed a professor. Tell me about your pedagogy.

BF: In grad school I used to joke,
"When I hear the word pedagogy, I reach for my
revolver." A strangely anti-theoretical bias given
my other interests. It was sparked, I think, by the
smugness of the composition specialists I knew in grad
school. Claims that there are right and wrong ways to
teach  or learn  just enrage me.

I loved school as a kid
 I was a real teacher's pet  but as an
adolescent I became intensely anti-authoritarian and
turned against school, helped along by the excessively
rule-bound education system in New York City, which is
where my family moved midway through my sixth-grade year.
In high school I read quite a few books of so-called
"radical pedagogy," and I suppose that informs
my practice in the classroom today. Certainly that
reading informs my poetics. In fact, that's how I learned
about Jack Spicer: from a book on teaching by James
Herndon, one of Spicer's friends. (Shortly after moving
to Berkeley I built up the courage to call Herndon to
tell him how much I admired his work. He invited me over
for a visit sometime. Alas, I was far too shy to take him
up on the offer.)

Retrospectively, I can see
that Spicer's ideas about "magic," "the
outside," "community" and so on manifest
themselves in an entirely different form in Herndon's
books as a style of teaching, and though my own style of
teaching is as different from Herndon's as my style of
writing is from Spicer's, I do feel there's a kinship in
my attitude about students.

I'm lucky to be teaching
at a university that gives credence to curiosity 
that allows me to pursue my varied interests. In the year
and a half that I've been here, I've taught poetry and
poetics, critical theory, American literature from
conquest to the present. Last year I taught
"Postmodern American Poetry" and an
introduction to graduate study loosely organized around
the story of Moses (texts by Hurston, Freud, Yerushalmi,
Derrida). This past semester I led a seminar on Emily
Dickinson; this spring I'll be exploring a psycho-social
threshold in the imagination as deployed in Uncle
Tom's Cabin and Pierre, in plays like The
Gladiator and The Drunkard, in Lydia Maria
Child's Letters from New York, in Dickinson and
Whitman and their sentimental contemporaries. But what's
ultimately at stake in all these classes is a particular
practice of reading. I'm as devoted to that practice as
any pervert to his or hers.

NG: Could you describe some of your
recent perversions in detail? What texts are enthralling
you? I've been finding myself gravitating to nature
writing  Maeterlink, Whitely, Mary Austin 
maybe because I always choose to live in metropolises. Do
you ever find you choose reading material to balance out
your geographical or intellectual or emotional
environment? Or to complement? Are you more random or
systematic as a reader?

BF: Funny you should mention nature
writing. I've dabbled in that a wee bit myself in recent
years, though I'm citified through and through. Pat Reed
and I used to go on an annual backpacking trip; I always
brought along a walkman. I used to sit at camp with a
book or notebook whenever she went tromping through the
brush. A real stick in the mud I was.

Those trips supplied some
surface detail to my writing, but by and large my
imagination is entirely preoccupied with man-made reality
(if I can put it that way). In this respect, my work is
exactly the opposite of Pat's, which was always suffused
with nature, even when her attention was located in the
city. I always admired that. My own attention screens out
as much as it takes in, but Pat's poetics are founded on
openness. She appraises our environment without
prejudice, and thus contributes to a more total
understanding of our actual situation as "social animals."
There are poets who take this mapping on as an
intellectual or moral project (Olson, Kyger, Ronald
Johnson, Hejinian to some extent, Dan Bouchard), but
those like Pat who are modest in their pedagogical aims
(Larry Eigner would be the preeminent example) tend to be
seen as marginal or even naive figures. There's a
tendency in intellectual circles to suppress the question
of nature and treat writers who take it up as childish,
romantic, unsophisticated. I wrote about this in an
unpublished review of Lisa Robertson's XEclogue.
The question of language has dominated poetic discourse
to such an extent that interest in language begins to
seem synonymous with serious intent. A lot of stupid,
sloppy writing draws inordinate attention that way, while
much that is significant or meticulous goes unremarked.

But that isn't why I began
reading nature writing, or isn't the sole reason. I've
also been compiling a list of significant works of
American literature that fall outside the purview of
survey courses. Most of these works are excluded from
consideration by reason of genre  the same
prejudice that represents James Baldwin on the basis of a
weak short story rather than a first-rate essay. Happily,
the teaching of early American writing doesn't suffer
from the same problem. A paucity of significant fiction
and poetry makes for a far more open understanding of
what constitutes literature than obtains in later
periods. Sermons, journals, letters, slave narratives,
political tracts, travel accounts and philosophical
essays abound. To judge from our anthologies, you would
think that these all disappeared after the Civil War. The
disparity between the ante- and post-bellum eras
vis-a-vis the kinds of writing one reads is
astonishing. I'd like to rectify that in my own teaching.
Nature writing is an obvious place to start. You'll find
Thoreau in any anthology, but what about Aldo Leopold or
Rachel Carson, or the wonderful, unread Helen Hoover? A
Sand County Almanac is far more significant, to my
mind, than Walden, and just as beautifully
written; its absence is indefensible.

The discrepancies between
the pre- and postwar period are maddening. Why Jonathan
Edwards but not William James? Why Thomas Jefferson but
not Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.? Why slave narratives but
not protest writing from later eras? Even autobiography
 our most enduring genre  slips in and out of
focus. And religion disappears altogether, along with
politics. Sadly, the problem is only spreading backward.
The great twentieth-century war correspondents are
missing (Ernie Pyle, Martha Gellhorn, Michael Herr,
Gloria Emerson), but so is the Civil War. Amazingly,
there's no Martin Luther King, Jr., or F.D.R., but Daniel
Webster is also gone.

The biggest scandal of all
is the treatment of immigrant writers and writers who
work in languages other than English. This too is a
problem especially evident in later periods. The Spanish
explorers and British-born Puritans pass muster; so too
do Crevecoeur and Equiano. Why then exclude Singer,
Brodsky, Wiesel, Walcott and Milosz  to stick to
our Nobel laureates  or Achebe, Arendt, Auden,
Brathwaite, Fuentes and Nabokov? Paul Muldoon is now a US
citizen. That makes him, to my mind, as American as
Eugene O'Neill, not to mention Henry Adams or Ezra Pound.

This is as much a matter
of politics as poetics. Perhaps it's because I'm a
refugee's child (and the grandchild of immigrants) 
or perhaps because my wife is a resident alien  but
I'm sensitive to abuse of the word "American"
in defense of a certain notion of culture. You earlier
suggested that "subjectivity" is out of fashion
these days. So's "pluralism," apparently. Call
me a rootless cosmopolitan, but I say to hell with that.
I'm a pluralist through and through.